“You Are the Character — Stop Questioning That”: Michael Chernus, Back To One, Episode 368
From Orange Is The New Black and Severance to Spider-Man:Homecoming and Inez & Doug & Kira, Michael Chernus has been consistently delivering performances that place him as one of the most cherished character actors working today. His latest happens to be the first time he’s staring in a television series—Devil In Disguise: John Wayne Gacy—and it’s bringing him some of the best reviews of his career. On this epic episode, he talks about the freedom he felt in knowing he would never truly know that character, and why it took every tool in his “toolkit” to depict him. He takes […]
An image of the Dalai Lama gives diasporic texture to an otherwise anonymous suburban American house; the camera tracks to the next room, where a father, mother, and son sit like statues. A Tibetan doctor arrives, and father Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) tells him that Western medicine cannot seem to explain the pain he feels in his heart. The doctor takes his pulse, not to know his heart rate, but to listen to something deeper and more intangible hiding in the inner self. The blood rushing through his veins rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling […]
When I first discovered the works of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch—academic anthropologists who opted to make films rather than books about their research subjects—my appreciation of their work was hampered by some lingering questions: “How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?” Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower? […]
Though Guillermo del Toro’s 1997 American studio debut Mimic was a notoriously unpleasant experience, the silver lining of that giant cockroach creature feature was the filmmaker crossing paths with Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen. It took 18 years for them to work together again, but they’ve made up for lost time since by teaming on Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley—the latter two brining Laustsen Oscar nominations. Their latest collaboration fulfills del Toro’s lifelong ambition to mount a version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror masterpiece Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac as the titular creator and Jacob Elordi as the […]
High in the Pyrenees, a centuries-old way of life approaches its twilight amid a controversial rewilding scheme. France’s government has for decades airlifted brown bears from Slovenia to repopulate those hunted out of existence by the region’s hunters. But the bears are apex predators who threaten the flocks of a community of shepherds, whose earth-bound traditions don’t readily coexist with state-mandated policy. Within this context, British filmmaker Max Keegan illuminates richly human connections with stirring observational portraiture in The Shepherd and the Bear, whose Academy Award-qualifying run begins Friday Nov. 21 at New York City’s Cinema Village. Much more about […]
If last year’s Maryland Film Festival felt like a trial run for a new era of Baltimore’s cornerstone film event, the 26th Maryland Film Festival solidified its direction. Bouncing back from the low point of 2023, when the event was postponed for a year due to financial constraints, MdFF looks to continue growing its reach—a herculean effort in 2025 as arts institutions across the country are under attack by crackdowns in free speech and having their federal funding gutted. “We were awarded [an NEA] grant, then it was taken away,” Nancy Proctor, the new executive director of the Parkway tells […]
Filmmaker is very happy to be partnering on December 6, 2025 with New York’s Metrograph for an evening of shorts drawn from the magazine’s 2025 25 New Faces list. I wrote for the Metrograph’s calendar, “Since its debut in 1998, Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list has annually curated a cross-section of emerging and impressive new independent film talent. Directors, writers, actors, below-the-line—these are filmmakers who have made indelible work in the past year and will go on to shape tomorrow’s film culture. With the magazine’s 29th edition of the list in its current edition, the editors have curated from their […]
June Squibb has only been acting for about seven decades, so forgive her if she hasn’t figured this whole acting thing out yet. Luckily she isn’t stopping or even slowing down. In fact, at 96 years old, she is more busy than ever before. Since her Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Squibb has been in high demand. Her first leading role in a film, Thelma, led to another, Eleanor The Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson. And now she’s about to take the stage in the exciting new Broadway production of Marjorie Prime. On this episode, […]
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound […]
Flophouse America is the unnervingly intimate feature debut of Monica Strømdahl, an internationally award-winning photographer who spent 15 years documenting the impoverished communities that have sprung up in rundown motels throughout the US. Which is how she met Mikal, an energetic, 11-year old boy who’s called home the hotel room he’s shared with his parents since the day he was born. Thus began a three-year cinematic collaboration, shot almost entirely in the aforementioned home, between the Norwegian director and the marginalized trio she captures through her quietly unwavering lens. Which allowed her, and now us, to serve as a silent […]